Conference calls and other not-in-person meetings are becoming more common. Often, some type of electronic calendar is used to schedule these meetings and capture the relevant information about the meeting and how to attend it. For example, a scheduled conference call, with all the relevant information about the meeting and how to connect to it, may be entered into Microsoft® Outlook (Microsoft is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, Wash.) and reside in its calendar.
However, connecting to these meetings remains a manual process. To attend a meeting, the attendee must have the information about the meeting in hand and manually enter the information required, in the proper order, to be able to connect to that meeting. For example, an attendee to a business conference call must either print out the information (e.g., dial-in number and access code) from an electronic meeting notice, write down the information, or bring the device with the electronic meeting notice to the room from which the call is to be made. Lacking the ability to connect to these meetings automatically often results in inefficiency and inconvenience for the attendees.